The View from the Boardwalk

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Tag Archives: “me-ness”

I am me again! I realized it just two weeks ago when I was lying awake in bed bathed by the light of the full “pink” moon that couldn’t resist shining through my window, I think to wake me.

Suddenly I felt released from winter, from the aches and pains, the head colds and sinus infections, the feeling small and self-contained, the endless physical annoyances that cold weather can bring. I could breathe fully. I slept the whole night. I felt relaxed and full of life… full of dreams. I could speak to people and look them in the eye. Joke with them and actually listen without distraction when they shared moments from their on-going lives, or small talk such as people are wont to do.

I’m told that it’s a “pink” moon because pink is the color of the wild phlox that is among the first flowers to blossom in the spring. Its arrival represents new beginnings and signals the start of several important religious festivals around the world, thereby attaching symbolic meaning to the cycle of nature, much as native peoples have done since the beginning of time.

I can’t remember having had this particular feeling of “me-ness” before. I think old age has made me keenly aware of transitions and change and, as much as it has left me wistful for the mental and physical dexterity I imagine I had in my youth, more often I find myself overjoyed and surprised that a child can still exist in this ancient body.

Surely time is not linear! If ever we needed proof that the claims of quantum physics are real, we need only look to the universe within. We grow old and younger at the same time. Memories spring from the well unfettered. We span generations in an instant and often get confused or lost, not knowing for sure how we got to this place or this state of being.

This winter, for the first time, I felt some of that confusion. I felt I had lost my ability to negotiate the lapses of thought, the lack of strength, the long nights of restless sleep and dreams that jolted me awake, startled by the sound of my own breathing. But this pink moon brought me to my senses. I am, and have always been, blessed.

That fact was never more apparent than when, on a whim, I decided to take a hike with my grandson on the forest trail across from the Stony Brook exit. I hadn’t been there in two or three years, but now that the boardwalk is under re-construction and parts of the loop trail have been closed off, it seemed a perfect alternative.

I may as well have walked into the primordial Garden! The air was still and warm, disturbed only by the early morning chattering of song birds and the occasional crackling of dry branches against leaves. We scaled the rock ledges with little effort, my grandson quickly finding the easiest footholds and reveling in the fact that I had to follow him. We stood together at the highest point, looking down at our new-found territory. I found myself recalling that same sense of adventure and self-discovery when I was young roaming through the back woods of Sunset Lake or clambering up the trails of Blue Hills on a family get-out-of-the-house day.

The pond was a perfect forest mirror, unbroken only by a single duck’s wake as he drifted to the far shore. No one else, it seemed, had ever discovered this space. My grandson teased me when I faltered on the path. I laughed that he would have to carry me out some day. He raced me to the spot where we could see the beaver lodge and marveled at the size of the tree they had taken down, I think to strip its bark for food during the winter. Then we looked for the return path to the parking lot, talking quietly about our plans for the day.

On the way out we ran into Mona Tighe, one of my favorite daily visitors to Stony Brook. No one takes more pleasure in a simple walk through the sanctuary or has a better eye for a returning migrant, a change in the landscape, a new birder looking for direction, or someone needing a friend. If anyone else should be privy to our sacred Garden, it should be she, so it seemed doubly significant that on our way back to civilization my grandson would meet her and then find a lucky penny just before we got to the street.

I know that not all spring days will be like this. That the feeling of “me-ness” will only be temporary. Spring is, after all, as much about promise as it is about disappointment, as much about innocence and renewal as it is about contradiction and change. But to be reminded of how powerful and uplifting, how restorative and elegant it can be to put ourselves into the arms of Nature is a treasure that never fades away. I believe my grandson began to learn that lesson this day.